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He has three cute kids, a wife who is Instagram au fait and is himself part of a generation that’s more DiCaprio than it is De Niro.

Oh, and yeah, he wants to be prime minister.

Sound familiar?

“Just water for me,” says Michael Chong to our server one recent afternoon at Toronto’s Soho House. Hydration before ambition, indubitably, for the Member of Parliament (for over a decade now) for the Ontario riding of Wellington-Halton Hills.

At 45 years old — born just a month apart from one Justin Trudeau — he’s ensconced in one of the battles of his life: running not only as leader of Canada’s Conservative Party and, ergo, the official opposition, but also as the standard bearer for what’s been described as an “inclusive, sober conservatism” during a time when identity politics has possibly taken up too much oxygen in his party.

“My conservatism is an optimistic conservatism,” he tells me, off the top, after we’d done our requisite catching-up about our days at Trinity College at U of T (we crossed paths there in a time, incidentally, when a floppy-haired DiCaprio had not yet met an iceberg and Chong, if I recall, already had the political bug).

How is Chong’s selfie game? One can’t help but wonder, this being the semiotics of our age. Well, while he might not have quite the PhD in camera-mugging that the present PM has, he did not long ago post a photo of himself driving a truck, on his farm, blithely picking up big, bad bales of hay. Virile!

And he’s not above poking a little fun at himself. When an official-looking portrait of Chong inexplicably wound up on a poster for sanitary public washrooms in Guatemala, he did what any rising political star would do: make an appearance on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, in which he took it in stride.

“I think it’s perfect since as a Canadian politician you’ve been probably talking crap for years,” said host Mark Critch.

Moving into young cool dad mode, Chong sounds not unlike many a 21st-century parent when we detour briefly into the subject of “screen time” rules that he and the missus, Carrie, have for their boys. “Weekends only,” he says.

Of course, one thing that doesn’t require its own overt hashtag is Chong’s heritage. It’s his own immigrant story that “could bring dozens of ridings, especially in suburban Toronto and Vancouver, back into the winnable column,” as one writer in Maclean’s recently mused. Chong is, in that way, a possibly aspirational figure, as demonstrated by a photo of his ancestors that recently made the rounds.

Reflecting on the picture — a black-and-white portrait from 1929 that showed his grandparents, and their children, resplendent in their Chinese silks — Chong says that his grandmother in the image was “pregnant with his father” and that his dad, Paul Chong — touched by the Battle of Hong Kong, in 1941, when Canadians defended the city — would later be inspired himself to set sail to Canada.

“Politics is about telling a story,” he goes on, and “the party has to better connect with Canadians by better telling our stories.”

Clearly at home in his own duality — his dad, a doctor, would go on to marry a woman from the Netherlands — Chong explains that his own family now is “two halves of the Canadian story: my wife’s family has been here since 1830, Scottish-English-Irish, and I’m the other half, in that my parents both came here as immigrants.”

Before the last election, he points out, the Conservatives were doing better on the diversity front than other parties but, since 2015, the Liberals have “clearly leapfrogged past.”

I had to ask: how did he personally self-identify growing up?

“Canadian!” he socks back. “Some of this, you don’t realize this until you grow up, but in our household my mother couldn’t understand Cantonese and my dad couldn’t understand Dutch. So there wasn’t really a choice.” Being biracial, moreover, “you don’t have a foot in either world, so you cling to a new identity . . . which was Canadian.” (For the record: Chong does self-identify with Chinese garlic spare ribs. He confirms that much.)

An aversion to a “nonhyphenated” model of identity? It’s clearly been a theme in Chong’s career, as evidenced by his resignation, in 2006, from Stephen Harper’s cabinet over the tabling of a motion recognizing “Quebec as a nation within a united Canada.” Making a principled stand against the statute — one that gave him his first major breeze of publicity in the nation — Chong said at the time, “It creates a system of two-tiered citizenship and that’s unacceptable to me.”

Fast-forward to 2017.

“Who are your supporters?” I broach.

He points to “younger conservatives” under the age of 30, a group he likes to sometimes glibly call the “Chontourage” and with whom he clearly enjoys a following. As well: “Conservatives who care about the environment,” a constituency he calls “green conservatives,” drawn by his campaign centrepiece of a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

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And about his precise pathway to winning — considering that’s he’s squarely in the middle of the pack in the polls? Chong points to the particularities of the “preferential ballot” and the fact that the final result could, hence, be made by as few as a hundred party members. “There’s a fluidity to the race,” he maintains.

But does his polite brand of politics align with the mood of the party, one that seems to be scratching at various itches of late? It’s a question that hangs over a conversation I had later with Rudyard Griffiths, the TV broadcaster and swami-about-town who was also Chong’s roommate at Trinity years ago.

“In many ways, he’s a reluctant politician,” shares Griffiths, adding, “but what you get is what you see. There’s not a lot of political artifice.”

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